Cory Doctorow Explains Why Big Tech Is Making the Internet Terrible

He also makes the argument that the quick-moving digital world allows monopolists to pivot to protect their position in a way erstwhile analog monopolists could not, but neglects mentioning that the same logic also removes significant barriers to entry for competitors:

> John D. Rockefeller was doing all this stuff one hundred twenty years ago, but if Rockefeller was like, “I secretly own this train line and I use the fact that it’s the only way to get oil to market to exclude my rivals, and I’m worried that there’s a ferry line coming that will offer an alternate route that will be more efficient,” he can’t just click a mouse and build another train line that offers the service more cheaply until the ferry line goes out of business and then abandon the train line. The non-digital example is capital intensive, and it demands incredibly slow processes. With digital, you can do a thing that I call “twiddling,” which is just changing the business logic really quickly.

It's pretty crazy to suggest removing capital-intensive constraints like those of physical infrastructure strengthens monopolistic positions.

Previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=enshitification

This (a direct quote from the interview, not just a subtitle) seems false to me. Unless we tweak the definitions to desirable innovations, or to the leadership and not the employees of Google, this has to be false.

At the very least we need to credit them for Gmail, which by showing that a non-terrible app could be done in the browser, lit a fire under web devs’ collective arses that is still going today. (Again, whether this was a good idea is orthogonal—one way or another, it was a contribution to the state of the art even if the browser tech was already there. IIRC it was also born as an employee-driven initiative, but that’s also orthogonal.)

We’ve also forgotten what a wonder Maps and Earth were at the time. Perhaps ladling out a gigantic pot of money in exchange for every commercially available bit of satellite imagery in the world isn’t that inventive. And yet—for some reason nobody did it before that in such quantity, and that quantity acquired a quality of its own.

Books were castrated by copyright law, but they’re still an impressive achievement. You still encounter those Google-watermarked PDFs on Archive.org (proper, not the Wayback Machine), and if they don’t have the polish of pirate libraries, neither do they make you remember how much OCR sucked in the 2000s.

And Search, well, web search is a moving target, and what reads as operational competence at a high level is almost certainly dozens of researchers inventing new things for years. I can’t say it’s been an unequivocal good for the world, but to call it staying still seems an exaggeration.

Also, Chrome. It was great at first, the thing that finally made me abadon Opera. And V8 brought to the mainstream the more dynamic bits of the Self research from Sun that wasn’t useful for the JVM. Not only Node—I don’t think we’d have LuaJIT today if not for V8 and the *Monkeys, and the initial V8 work was what breached the ivory tower there.

(Does Android count? Undeniably most of what it is now is from after the Google acquisition, but they say it’s an enclave with a separate culture within the company. Dunno.)

It also bothers me how this kind of article seems to always be written by people who have no idea about what is the kind of work and challenges that go into building products that can actually get adopted by people.

Just wish we could crowd fund another country or planet to avoid all this BS....

I think he means they hate the free market. Many people think capitalism and the free market depend on each other but free markets existed for a long time before capitalism. It's the free market that forces capitalists to compete.